SIX Summer School - Mumbai

Principal and Communications Lead Kevin Shane was part of an expert panel at the SIX Summer School in Mumbai which discussed innovation in the water and sanitation space, both in India and globally. Using Quicksand's work in the space, specifically the Potty Project and Project Sammaan, Kevin shared the challenges inherent in experimenting and innovating in a context fraught with challenges and one that affects billions of people around the world. The panel featured representatives from around the world, and stressed the need for collaboration across all stakeholders to develop solutions that are sustainable in the long-term and implementable in the short-term. An annual event, SIX Summer Schools bring together leading social innovation thinkers and practitioners from across the world to explore some of the key issues facing the field – such as scaling and innovation in crisis settings.

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During the course of a five-day workshop and crash course held at NID with students from the NID Exhibition Design program, Salil and Hugo, two Quicksand design researchers explored new possibilities in storytelling through the creation of unique virtual spaces in Unity using a mix of digital content and items 3D scanned using photogrammetry.

Quicksand hosted an executive team from Schneider Electric as part of a Learning Expedition program organized by WDHB. The team had the chance to meet local energy and micro-grid experts through a facilitated discussion format on novel best practices in emerging markets:

Quicksand Co-Founder and Partner Ayush Chauhan and Principal & Communications Lead Kevin Shane led a daylong workshop at UX India, India’s largest international user experience conference. The theme of the workshop was Design for Social Impact, and Ayush and Kevin led the participants through several design activities and games using case studies from Quicksand’s decade-long experience in the sector.

Principal & Communications Lead Kevin Shane was part of a panel discussion on “Design for Social Impact” at the Under 25 Summit, India’s largest youth festival. Leaning on his experiences working in the development and humanitarian sectors, Kevin highlighted the key role of the design thinking process in driving both innovation and impact in the work Quicksand does.

Senior Design Researcher Rikta Krishnaswamy was featured in Channel News Asia’s premiere episode of the series “Field Guide to Innovation”. Along with our partners on the project, Rikta discussed our recent work in Cambodia to reduce the use of plastic bags in the country, whilst also advocating for a human-centered approach to designing new, innovative solutions to longstanding problems and challenges.

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Co-founder Ayush Chauhan spoke at the annual workshop of the University of Chicago Center in Delhi commemorating the graduating class of International Innovation Corps, a year long fellowship program that sends top student talent to work with Indian government on critical development problems. Ayush's panel was on Last Mile Connectivity focusing on how successfully piloted solutions and interventions can be effectively rolled out and adopted across the target audience.

Ayush led by saying that the design of good quality, sustainable pilots required program teams to champion the last mile - that moment of truth when all the careful deliberation on systems, policy and enabling institutions meets the consumer. Using Quicksand's work on the direct benefit transfers project and the urban sanitation project as examples, he demonstrated how an ostensibly powerful, transformative public policy begins to break down when no one champions the end-user.

After sharing a few observations from the two projects, Ayush spoke of the value of human centered design (HCD) as an approach to work through these very challenges, highlighting three core aspects of HCD:

- Understand end-user experience (to integrate people centered research as a part of one's personal repertoire of skills and tools and not relegate it to commissioned studies)

- Co-create solutions (learn to involve stakeholders early on from a wide spectrum of specializations no matter how ambiguous and unclear the problem may be at the moment)

- Make prototyping and testing a continuous part of the process (move it out of the domain of just pilots and make it a part of program scale up and implementation as well)

Communications Lead and Business Head (U.S. Operations) Kevin Shane was the guest host of St. Bonaventure University's BonaResponds podcast. Kevin, a St. Bona alumnus, spoke about his experiences living and working overseas, his role in the innovative, design-led sanitation initiative Project Sammaan, and his activities supporting an upcoming cultural exchange program that will bring 20 college students from Haiti to the United States.

Listen to the full podcast here or download it for free via BonaResponds' channel on iTunes.

Partners Avinash and Neha participated in a meeting with DutchCulture, centre for international cooperation, NL to discuss future collaborations around Unbox. The Unbox team shared emerging theme in India, which are ripe for creative collaboration. The visit also included meetings and discussions with creative studios such as Waag Society, AGA, TransArtists amongst others, the purpose of which was to start conversations on platforms and formats of collaboration on said themes. One of the key outcomes of the visit was the decision to hold an Unbox Pop-Up in Amsterdam in Sept-Oct this year, to bring together the Unbox team and Dutch creatives and cultural agencies to finalise formats for collaboration.

Kevin was a guest speaker at the Tufts University Ideation Lab as part of the Archimedes Project, a social enterprise that ideates, incubates, and launches sustainable, scalable social enterprises around the world that leverage existing novel technologies to improve access to clean water and sanitation, fighting associated waterborne disease. Kevin was featured as one of the sanitation experts and presented Quicksand's work on the Potty Project and Project Sammaan, converting Quicksand's real-world experiences into case studies to help ensure long-term sustainability and successful implementation of students' social ventures that emerge from the lab.

Sanitation is a complex social and developmental challenge to tackle, and a conversation about a transformational shift in the sector - making our cities and villages open defecation free - is not complete without addressing issues around infrastructure creation, technology, operations and maintenance, business model, communication, behavior change, political will, policy environment, and finally private and public sector capacities.

Ayush stressed the need for including the fundamental issue of design, whether it is the design of toilet building and technology, design of business models, or the design of a long term operating model, and the fact that the application of this core skill in making the experience of the end-user one that could prompt or support a behavior change is often compromised.